Poetic transcribbling: Ted Berrigan & Harris Schiff’s Yo-Yo’s with Money and Beaned in Boston

Abstract

In 1977 and 1978, the poets Ted Berrigan and Harris Schiff attended two baseball games, pretending to be game announcers and recording their repartee on a newly-released TCM-100 cassette tape recorder. The transcription of first game, between the Yankees and the Red Sox on September 14, 1977, was published by United Artists in 1979 as the mimeograph book Yo-Yo’s with Money. The second experiment, a May 26, 1978, Red Sox–Tigers game, was a ‘failure’, as Schiff puts it, and the audio recording was never fully transcribed. Using readings of tonal shifts in the text, an interview with Schiff, and archival material, including the Beaned in Boston tapes and Yo-Yo’s with Money’s original mimeograph title page and transcript, this essay examines Schiff and Berrigan’s self-reflexive process. I argue that the TCM-100 extends the qualities–immediacy, frequency, and ephemerality–which make the mimeograph so appealing as a production technology to writers and artists, and this moment occurs in anticipation of mimeo’s obsolescence. Furthermore, I suggest that these collaborative works can be viewed as ‘transcribbling’, a ludic form of transcription, enabled by this combination of tape recorder and mimeo.